


Ordinary

by rufeepeach



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: F/M, coffee shop AU, well kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-05-01 00:36:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5185493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah Williams has surrounded herself in the prosaic, in the ordinary and commercial, in a desperate attempt to ignore the magic she knows lurks just beneath the surface. But even with the best defences, magic always finds a way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ordinary

It starts in a Starbucks.

Which isn’t fair, really, in retrospect, because she was supposed to be safe there. Sarah Williams surrounds herself with the prosaic, with mass production and modernity and bland, everyday life. She doesn’t visit old antique shops or independent second-hand bookstores, she doesn’t wander through the woods or stare at the full moon. Sarah works every day of her life to avoid any glimmer of magic or imagination, and in return magic leaves her the hell alone.

But then, one day in October, she’s innocently waiting for her usual utterly unremarkable latte, and the world shifts. A tall man, slender and pale, reaches out long-fingered hand to reach for his drink from the bar. She moves out of the way automatically, and looks around, catching the man in profile.

Jareth’s mismatched eyes blink back at her, unceasingly, staring, and she flinches, cries out, recoils. He smirks, the smile that haunts her nightmares, and in that one expression he demands her return, exacts her prize for victory, declares his intention to drag her back Underground and trap her there forever. In that moment Sarah is no longer safe, no longer warm and comfortable in the ordinary and the normal, and everything is hard and bright and _violent_  and- 

Sarah blinks hard, looks away, and when she looks back…

He’s ordinary, prosaic, just a skinny man in a suit, his long blonde hair the only vaguely unusual thing about him, and that pulled back into a ponytail. His features are unremarkable, forgettable, certainly unfamiliar and Sarah shakes her head to clear it, annoyed with herself for seeing demons where there are none.

She apologises, blames something banal like lack of sleep or a late assignment, and grabs her latte from the counter with terrified urgency. She doesn’t linger: she leaves before he can say a word in a clipped, British accent and turn her world (or maybe before he can speak and prove himself an American, nothing out of the ordinary, and prove she’s truly lost her mind).

\---

Sarah doesn’t run.

Ordinary girls with ordinary lives don’t run from coffee shops, or their perfectly ordinary customers. Sarah walks, quickly: she has a train to catch, a life to live, a whole safe, clean, ordinary life, and it can’t wait.

“Excuse me, miss?” a hand catches her wrist, lightly, inoffensively, and Sarah turns without thinking. The man before her is the man from before, the man with the unremarkable face, his blonde hair tied neatly at his nape as if all men wore it that way. It was only the hair that allowed her to remember him at all, Sarah insisted to herself: it was not because, for a moment, he’d been the spitting image of someone else. Someone distinctly memorable, the most remarkable of men.

“Yes?” she asks, brusquely, trying to get away even as he drops her wrist.

“You took my order,” he tells her, in a smiling tone that contains a little laugh at the situation. “I have yours here.”

“Oh,” Sarah looks down at her cup, and sure enough, the order on the side is not hers. It also bares no name, which for some reason sends a shiver down her spine, although she can’t imagine every barista in America remembers to write a name on every cup. It’s the anonymity that worries her, the lack of an ordinary name to put to the decidedly ordinary face. A name would anchor him, make him knowable and thus reduce him, reduce this whole ridiculous, unsettling incident into insignificance.

He hands her her own cup, with her name printed on it and her order on the side, and she takes it with a shaking hand. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Sarah,” the man smiles, and for a moment his face is sharper, familiar, his eyes flashing predatory, and she flinches. His voice is a drawl, and there’s a hint, just a hint, of a clipped accent beneath his nondescript tone.

“How did you know my name?” she asks, trying for a smile, trying to sound teasing and normal, and not scared witless. 

“It’s on your cup,” he smiles, the pointed gleam lost as fast as it came, replaced with an air of careless, casual friendliness. 

“So it is,” she laughs, relief and anxiety both bringing the sound from her lips. It’s forced, empty, broken like a cracked bell, and his gaze sharpens again. “Yours isn’t,” she notes, and he shrugs.

“I never give my name unless I have to,” he tells her. “One never knows what a stranger might do with it.”

“Give you the correct coffee order, I’d assume,” she replies. He gives an odd, low chuckle at that.

“Didn’t seem to do you much good,” he notes.

“You won’t tell me yours, then?” she asks, “To even the score.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary,” he murmurs, that sharp, unsettling glitter in his eyes returning, and Sarah takes a step back and shakes her head.

“I’m late,” she babbles, “I have to go, I’m late.”

“Yes, you are,” he murmurs, inexplicably, and for a moment she knows him, his face is the same, his eyes mismatched, his hair wild, and the world shifts on its axis and nothing, nothing is safe or clean or ordinary. “Run,” he hisses, “run while you can.”

Sarah does just that: she runs, dodging people and cars alike, over the road, up the sidewalk, around the corner, and another, and another, her boot-clad feet pounding the pavement, her heart racing, her face flushed. She runs as if the entire Goblin army were at her back, as if the world behind her were falling away, and she doesn’t look back, not even for a second.


End file.
